Erin Hatch of San Diego just paid $65 for a video game he hasn't even seen yet. Canadian entrepreneur Steven Dengler spent $10,000.

They're both avid gamers and they love the idea of crowd funding, where like-minded individuals pitch in money to bootstrap a project from scratch. Hatch, 28, and Dengler, 44, are among the 74,000 people who contributed $5 to $10,000 to finance the role-playing game "Torment: Tides of Numenera" from Newport Beach video game developer inXile entertainment.

InXile and Irvine-based Obsidian Entertainment have lately become crowd-funding superstars, raising a total of more than $11 million on the Kickstarter website to launch their next games. The first of them, "Wasteland 2" from inXile, isn't expected until October.

The $4.2 million inXile raised through Friday set a record for a video game on Kickstarter, surpassing the $4 million raised by Obsidian Entertainment in October for its game, "Project Eternity."

Using Kickstarter, the two small Orange County companies are able to cut out middleman publishers and investors, getting upfront money and immediate customer feedback while forging a direct relationship between the creative game-making talent and the people who obsessively play them.

InXile CEO Brian Fargo, 50, is staking his company's future on the new model. He took to Kickstarter last year, shortly after he saw the success of "Double Fine Adventure," a game that raised $3.3 million from fans. In a matter of weeks, he put together the "Wasteland 2" project, a sequel to a genre-defining, post-apocalyptic role playing game Fargo worked on in the 1980s.

Fargo made a pitch video and put it up on the site on March 13, 2012. A month later, he had $2.9 million and a new direction for his business.

"It's just one of the coolest things to happen in the 21st century," said Dengler, an entrepreneur and investor. "I don't think we're going to realize how fundamentally (crowd-funding) changes society for 20, 30 years."

Dengler co-founded currency information site xe.com in 1993 and invests in a number of companies. And he backs a lot of crowd-funding projects at the highest levels. The fact that he has less time to actually play video games nowadays just makes him more choosy.

In addition to funding Obsidian and inXile's projects at the highest $10,000 level, he also agreed to put in $100,000 if the project surpassed the $3 million mark.

"I do take equity positions in companies with an expectation of return, (but) the return in this case is the game – not just for us, but everyone," Dengler said.

Crowd-funding investors not only get early dibs on a game but also are in the thick of making it happen.

Kickstarter provides tools for companies to update their backers. Starting at $20, supporters are promised digital copies when the game is finished. Put in more money and you get a packaged copy of the game on disc, collectibles and the chance to name or design parts of the game.

At the highest funding level, $10,000, you're invited to a private launch party.

The downside for crowd-funding investors is that many projects never reach fruition. Kickstarter is a graveyard of startup dreams; fewer than half of all projects there succeed in reaching their minimum goals. In those cases, no money changes hands.

But projects that do get funded are often plagued by delays or never materialize, left in a state of perpetual limbo.

For companies, crowd-funding failure risks burning their most loyal followers.

"If they don't follow through, their reputation is going to drop as far as it can go," said Scott Betts, a 27-year-old Tustin resident who backed all three local video-game projects.

Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart, 42, is taking a more measured approach to crowd funding. His team is working on Kickstarter-backed "Eternity," a role-playing game, as well as an earlier publisher-financed project based on the popular cartoon "South Park." The company is in talks with publishers about making games for the upcoming new generation of game-playing consoles arriving later this year. Kickstarter is still an option, though.

"We would love to return to Kickstarter once we find a project that we think is special," Urquhart said. "Like with Project Eternity, we want to spend a good three to six months figuring out the right thing that is something we are absolutely into making and that, we hope, everyone will be excited about backing."

Eventually the games will enter a testing period, and backers will be the first to try them and offer feedback.

"As smart as my guys are, you can never compete with 74,000 people looking at something," Fargo said. "You can't compete with the smarts of a large crowd."

On Friday, a crowd of 50 to 100 people – inXile developers and their families, fans of their games and major backers of "Torment" – gathered to party at a bayside restaurant in Newport Beach. Guests munched hors d'oeuvres, sipped drinks, played games and counted down to the 5 p.m. fundraising deadline as the money rolled in to the very last second.

Fans had brought knapsacks filled with copies of games that Fargo and others worked on decades ago – a dose of nostalgia from an era when games came on large floppy disks in sleeves reminiscent of a vinyl record.

Now the pressure is on to deliver not just "Wasteland 2" but the newly funded "Torment." It was unusual to go back to Kickstarter while the first game wasn't complete, but Fargo said members of his 21-person company who were finishing "Wasteland 2" had no other project to work on.

As a result, inXile's future is at this point is entirely reliant on the will of the crowd.

"If we deliver a great game experience for 'Wasteland 2,'" Fargo said, "that's going to set this company up potentially for decades."

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